


The Twelfth Day of Christmas

by keire_ke



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Charles Xavier has a Ph.D in Adorable, Erik is Crushing Harder than a 12-year Old Girl, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-13
Updated: 2013-12-13
Packaged: 2018-01-04 13:43:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1081695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keire_ke/pseuds/keire_ke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Secret Santa is supposed to be easy. You are assigned the name of a person of whose existence you are aware, you buy them a gift that at least implies you know the person isn't a seven-headed dragon and you move on with your own gift of the same calibre. What to do, however, when the person for whom you are supposed to be shopping happens to be the man you have a thoroughly unmanly crush on?</p><p>Of course, because you are Erik Lehnsherr, it spirals downhill from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Twelfth Day of Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jessa_anna](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jessa_anna/gifts).



> My sincerest thanks to Ninemoons42, for making sure the story is readable. Thank you!
> 
> I hope you find it to your liking, Jessa_Anna. :)

# The Twelfth Day of Christmas

 

The Secret Santa holiday exchange haunted Erik's nightmares. And dreams. Once it haunted his morning shower, when he imagined the really perfect gift he could offer. Oh yeah, he went there.

The problem was that this year was special. Different. Any other year he would have bought a box of fancy kosher chocolates (expensive enough to be personalized, affordable enough to fit within the budget constraints, thank you family discount from maîtresse Edie Eisenhardt-Lehnsherr, master chocolatier), after making sure via Charles that the person in question wasn't allergic. This year, however, Erik drew a particular name out of the randomization engine Tony Stark engineered into a Christmas Helmet every employee had to publically put on (Miss Potts had since apologized for making her employer read _Harry Potter_ ), which meant Erik's usual brand of thoughtless personalization was out of question. This gift had to be _personal_. This was also the year Erik promised himself he was going to tell Charles he had a massive boner for his brain, and also his body.

Well, it was December tenth and Charles still rolled across the neuro-research division of Stark Enterprises without a clue. Did he say December tenth? He of course meant December the twentieth, the night of the office party, and he had exactly nothing, courtesy of Tony Stark, who dropped in on him shortly after the Secret Santa was a go and dropped a massive project right into his lap. Erik'd barely surfaced for air since. He wasn't a clueless enough romantic to imagine perfect gifts would make any difference at all to the courting process, not where Charles was concerned, but he had an inkling a good gift might at least get him a foot in the door. Maybe a date. If he could demonstrate thoughtfulness and some such.

"Hey."

Erik looked up and immediately looked back down, containing the flush on his face. "Hello," he said gruffly. "Can I help you?"

"I was actually thinking I could help you," Charles said, pushing the door open and propelling himself over the doorstep in the same move. Erik couldn't help imagining the same effortlessness going on in his wide, luxurious shower. "It's eight p.m. and you're still here. The party is about to start."

Erik blinked at the screen. He had indeed been so immersed in his report that he was letting a free booze-up pass him by. "Fuck."

"Don't worry about it, I hear Tony is late, and no party begins without a speech from our beloved slave driver."

"Why aren't you there?" Erik asked, again on the gruff side of human interaction. Charles, luckily, never paid it much mind. One of the benefits of being a telepath, Erik assumed.

"I was running preliminaries on Cerebro," Charles said, sounding at once proud and exhausted. His eyes fluttered when Erik snapped his fingers and the fluorescent light flooded the room, fighting the onslaught of photons. This wasn't a good sign.

"You don't look great."

"It needs to be finished," Charles said simply.

"We can survive without it for another day. Or week."

"This could be a breakthrough in prosthetic limbs, you know, with the data we can finally begin to integrate—" Charles cut himself short with a curse. He'd accidentally stumbled into a pile of obsolete hard drives, date of manufacture September 2013.

"Fat load of good that will do if you kill yourself along the way," Erik muttered. He wasn't a fan of the Cerebro project. To say it was controversial would be like calling an apple a fruit. Erik could see the potential for shit blowing up in just about every single inch of the extensive machine, but of course if Tony Stark wanted a psionic Facebook, Tony Stark would get a psionic Facebook. Which it wasn't, but Erik had been present at the meeting where Charles made the proposition, and that's exactly how Stark reacted to the idea.

"I feel fantastic, I have no idea what you mean," Charles said haughtily and smiled immediately after. He did have a point – he had poured himself into a fitted tuxedo, which would make anyone look amazing. On someone with Charles' broad shoulders and strong chest it looked positively indecent. Erik returned the tentative smile and started saving and closing files on his desktop. "Oh, and Merry Christmas."

Erik looked up to find Charles had extended his hand and in the groove of his palm there was a small, shining thing, a cellophane wrapper, and in it, his mutation was telling him, there was a sliver of vibranium, no heavier than a penny.

It matched the eleven tiny packages Erik had found on his desk since the ninth, each containing a tiny amount of a rare alloy. Charles had been giving him metal, Erik thought, fighting the intense breathing difficulty he had developed all of a sudden. "Thank you," he said, feeling uncomfortably like he ought to be scuttling into the other room and weaving the bits into a leafy canopy of some sort, so that there could be courting and nesting and shit. "How did you even get those?"

All unfortunate shortness of breath and stupid flushing aside, those alloys weren't exactly easy to come by, nor were they cheap. Erik suspected Charles might have money to burn (because who else would spring for a tuxedo which looked like it was sewn around them), but Miss Potts looked cross whenever someone broke the rules of Secret Santa, including, but not limited to, the price range, and when Miss Potts got cross Stark got vengeful.

"I had a tough time coming up with expensive cellophane, that's true. The alloys are scraps from Tony's private workshop," Charles explained, looking uncharacteristically shy. If he were standing he'd be shining his shoe on one of his shins, and the image of Charles Xavier, one of the few people who could go toe to toe with Tony Stark and win, fumbling like a schoolboy with a crush, drew a boisterous laugh out of Erik. Trust Xavier to go for the semi-legal appropriation of company funds.

Erik couldn't wait to collect the pieces into something that _resonated_. He already felt the faint thrumming in the cupboard, like a bowl of ingredients of Mama's gingerbread waiting to be assembled and heated to perfection. "How did you know?" he asked quietly, lifting number twelve out of Charles' palm and letting it soar across the room into his.

"I might have noticed that while you aren't keen on Cerebro, you never waste an opportunity to come inside. Please don't be mad, but I do notice how you listen to it, and I figured it had something to do with the metal. I hope those will work, you said you only need a little…" Charles trailed off, uncertain.

"They are perfect."

Charles offered the brightest of his smiles in return. "I'm glad!"

Erik smiled back, slow and unsure, because of his many fine qualities comforting smiles were not exactly noticeable, but he tried, nonetheless. At least until it struck him that he had nothing for Charles, that tonight was the night of the party, and he had nothing. Hastily he threw his shields up, hoping that Charles wasn't looking too closely, but one glance told him he could get away with murder today – the man looked knackered, as though he'd much rather lock the world outside than participate in it.

"You really look terrible," Erik said. "Maybe you shouldn't go to the party."

"I'll make a cursory appearance. It wouldn't be sporting if I didn't." Charles shook his head. "Only an hour or so, I would hate to have worn the tuxedo for nothing. I called a taxi, do you want to share?"

Erik looked at his desktop, where every pertinent project was pinging itself saved and closed, and commanded the system to shut down. "Yes."

*****

Ten minutes later Charles was folding his wheelchair into a neat rectangle by doing some physically impossible thing to its handles, while Erik watched a little dumbstruck. "What just happened?" he managed when the chair was flat and compact enough to ride with them in the back seat of the cab.

"Tony Stark happened," Charles said in that special tone most people used when Tony Stark came up in a conversation, which more often than not meant they wanted to express admiration and exasperation in the same breath.

"It looks comfortable," Erik said, quite truthfully. Many of his fantasies involved that wheelchair, its sleek, aerodynamic line and no less alluring occupant, and even with two to a wheelchair, he never got a pretend injury.

"Again, Tony Stark." Charles offered a blinding grin. "The Savoy, please," he told the driver.

Erik would admit, with no one twisting his arm, that he watched Charles' reflection in the window as they pulled away from their workplace and pulled into the traffic, and that the sight absorbed him so that he almost missed the moment the cab skidded on ice. He heard the driver curse and then scream, and he felt, most keenly, a wave of panic go through him, one that he knew wasn't his own. But it wasn't just the skidding. Erik looked out the window on Charles' side and saw a bus coming straight at them, so close he could see the fear in the driver's eyes.

It shouldn't have happened. He was in the goddamned car, he was better than this. He was juggling cars before he got the right to vote. Right now, however, he was exhausted, his reaction time was slow, and so the only thing he could possibly do was to reach across the seat and pull Charles close, tucking him into the collar of his jacket, even as he held his other hand up and pushed.

With the wisps of concentration at his command he managed to block the wheels, which in turn toppled the bus and sent it spiraling across the square, slamming into the other vehicles like they were bumper cars at an arcade, until finally slamming into their cab and sending it into a lamppost. Only then, when all movement had stopped and the bright colors swirling in front of Erik's eyes went away, did he dare to look around.

The driver in the front seat began cursing up a storm, gaining volume and creativity as he went. The tone and sentiment seemed to imply anger rather than harm, however, so Erik paid him no mind. He turned to Charles instead, alarmed to find his companion pale and unresponsive.

"Charles?"

No response. Panic began to seep in. "Charles, goddamn it." Erik felt for the metal components in the car, trying to figure out where they warped and if anything was out of order. Charles wouldn't feel damage to his legs, Erik told himself. It was important to check if they weren't sitting in a puddle of blood.

Thankfully, a cursory inspection told him no actual harm had been done. By the time it hit them the bus had been travelling slowly, and they weren't so much hit as pushed against a lamppost, which was on Erik's side, anyway, which was where the car had been warped. The hit hadn't been particularly strong, either. In fact, despite the amount of cars dented along the way, this seemed to Erik like a relatively harmless crash.

"Buddy, you okay?" the driver asked, turning in place. The door on his left was completely blocked by the bus, while Erik could still see the street over Charles' head, and the lamppost was now sprouting from the front passenger seat, but the driver wasn't even scratched. Immobilized, yes, but his even tone suggested the initial panic had faded and his mood returned to "groovy."

"I'm good, I don't think we were hit that hard," Erik said, disgusted with himself at how even his voice was.

"Your friend there?"

"I don't know." To Erik's relief his voice cracked a little and some genuine emotion filtered through. "Charles…"

The only reply was a low moan. _I can hear everything_ , Charles whispered into his mind after a minute, and by the wince on the driver's face every mind in the vicinity, loud and clear.

Shit, Erik thought. Shit fuck crap.

"What do you need?"

_Hurts… My leg is broken. Oh god, my leg is broken. I can see the bone!_

"No it isn't. Charles, your legs are fine." Erik satisfied his curiosity by running a hand down Charles' shins, searching for anything at all that would suggest otherwise, and finding nothing. "Charles – you can't feel your legs. You're fine. Nothing is broken. We just slammed into a lamppost, we are fine."

 _不要哭了，妹妹_ , Charles thought at him, blinking irregularly. His face was pale, part of which must have been the neon lights, clearly reflected in his vacant blue irises.

Erik chanced a look at the pandemonium outside. There were people coming out of the bus, crawling over the broken windows and if the traffic was any less loud he could probably hear the cries more clearly, but it seemed like no terrible harm had been done. Other than the broken leg and Charles, that was. There were a few dazed people with blood on their faces, but as all of them were standing and wandering about, Erik wasn't inclined to care.

"Charles, what's wrong?" he asked again, tightening his hold.

He waited, holding the breath in his lungs, in case he missed a whisper, which finally came, fragile and broken. "I need to get out of here," Charles half spoke half projected. "I can't—Erik, I can feel everything." Then he whimpered, clawing at his temples. "Make it stop!"

"I've got you," Erik said softly, running a hand through Charles' hair. He tried to focus, tried to move the skeleton of the car around them, with them, but all he managed was a slight warping of the structure, not enough to free a pet rat. Damn it to hell. "Fuck," he moaned, when a wave of pain travelled from his neck into his brain. He really should have slept the previous night. Or perhaps he should have refrained from upturning buses; that might have made a contribution. When was the last time he had to lift something heavier than a hard drive?

Charles let out a long moan, burying his face in Erik's shoulder, somehow sending a complete schematic of Cerebro over to the neighboring brain.

"Fuck," Erik said, when the information filtered through. That's what Charles' spent doing the past month: submitting his big brain to higher and higher amplifications, until he could span the globe with the aid of a satellite or a well-placed psionic hub. No wonder he was going out of sync and fast. It was a miracle he was still conscious.

A persistent thought nagged at him. Charles needed shields, and needed them now. Whatever he was trying to do wasn't enough. Erik reached into his pocket, closing his fingers around a complimentary StarkPhone.

"Stark Tower, Jarvis speaking," said the cultured British voice on the other side. "How can I help you, Mr. Lehnsherr?"

"Is Stark there?"

"No, Mr. Stark has left for the office party. May I remind you that you were expected there an hour ago yourself?"

"Thanks, really." Erik clutched Charles closer, looking around for a fire fighter. He spotted two, slowly making their way through the wreckage of the bus. "Fuck," he said again, before turning to the cracked window. "Hey! Firepeople!"

One of the firefighters trotted over, while Erik made the window roll down at the cost of exacerbating his headache. "Are you alright, sir?"

"We don't seem to be harmed," Erik said, while the driver waved, "but my friend here is going through a telepathic meltdown."

"How can we help?"

"He needs isolation and quiet."

The firefighter, who was a strangely petite woman with red lipstick and an auburn curl of hair on her forehead, bit her lip. "We'd get to you as soon as we can, but we need to evacuate the bus first. There's been some injuries, nothing life-threatening, but…"

"Shit."

"It's a good thing the bus collapsed, the friction between the road and the side slowed it down," the firefighter said. "There were some pedestrians on the road. Will you hold?"

"Looks like I've got no choice," Erik said, feeling the slightest bit better about the toppled bus.

"Mr. Lehnsherr?" the phone chirped with the curious voice of a phlegmatic British AI.

"We're in a tiny pileup," Erik said into the phone. "We might skip the party."

"Mr. Lehnsherr—"

Erik hung up. Charles was staring ahead with glassy eyes, and his lips never ceased moving, forming words which melted into disjointed phrases, blown into the wind with every breath. "Come inside," he said before he could think about it, shaking Charles by the shoulder. "Charles. Right now."

There was a faint flicker of recognition lighting up Charles' blue eyes, even as they burned with the odd, non-physical fever. The ghost of pain, Erik suspected, watching a girl be lifted from another crashed vehicle by a pair of paramedics, with her arm in a heavy cast. "Erik?" Charles whispered.

"Come into my head," Erik said gently. "I can help with the shielding."

"You're not a telepath."

"You look like you're dying. I wager I'm better than you are, right now."

"I'm going to need twenty ccs of fluids, give it right here, I don't care – fuck, don't drop the needles!" Charles arched his back and keened. "Hurts!"

"Charles—"

There were no more words, just a ball of fear and pain slamming him in the gut, in the heart, everywhere his brain projected sensation. He was a hundred people all at once, some moaning in pain, some frightened out of their minds, confused, focused, scattered, bleeding—

No. Erik shook his head and pulled up the tallest walls he could possibly imagine, folding them like scales around his mind and the curled-up bundle of confused emotion and thought that was Charles. It hurt. There was no denying that. There was pain and not just the filtered pain, coming through the minds watching, experiencing the accident, but the overwhelming crush of a mind Erik was physiologically unable to handle. He persevered, nonetheless, building up the walls, the items of focus. "I've got you," he whispered time and again, feeling Charles shiver in response. "It's alright."

He lost track of time, because the next thing to catch his attention was the screech of torn metal. Erik blinked and looked up into the face of Iron Man, who was shining his luminescent eyes down at the two of them in the back of the cab, in place of the roof which was no longer there.

"I knew I should have sicced Jarvis on you, Xavier," Stark said behind the mask.

"He needs quiet," Erik mumbled, half-conscious of his own tongue. You try to be calm when a telepath is having a series of very bad identity crises in your head. "Everyone is so loud. And broken."

"Okay, no problem, we can do that. One red carpet to Quietsville coming right up." The armor hopped off the roof of the cab, landing on the pavement with a crunch of ice underneath its boots. "Excuse me! Which of you fine gentlemen, sorry gentlepeople—"

Erik tuned Stark out, not really interested in the nuts and bolts of his arrangement with the City Council. Charles was still only half conscious, although the bundle of confusion in his inner self was unfolding slowly, spreading like vine over the inner walls of Erik's mind. He probably should be a little more alarmed, Erik thought drowsily, but it was warm and sunny and the noise finally went away, along with the lights, all that he could see were distant flickers, rivers of light, like he was floating, like…

"Holy fucking shit!" he yelled, when the reality filtered through.

"You okay, buddy?" The driver turned to him, flashing a row of pearly-white teeth and a surprisingly cartoonish impression of exuberance. Erik shook his head. The latter was an afterimage via Charles' telepathy, unwelcome in context. "Iron Man is giving us a ride."

Sure indeed there was Tony Stark's beloved child and project, holding what looked like a hose, on which the cab dangled, in each hand. Erik filed the memory away, to freak out in private, when his freakout wouldn't disturb the man currently flying the cab through the New York City skyline.

Erik thought, more than once, that he should learn how to fly. Theoretically he should be able to, particularly if he bothered to line his shoes with iron sheets, but then he'd have to add plates to his clothes, because flying upright was unseemly, then he'd have to invest in goggles… No, the subway was his choice of transportation, always, despite the smell. The trains pulsed with magnetic waves, and more than once Erik found himself floating, giddy inside and out.

No sooner had he thought that that a mist of awe and admiration descended on his soul. Erik fluttered his eyelashes, confused, until he realized this was Charles, admiring the memory he was playing out with childlike curiosity and adoration. He was still too out of it to attempt speech, but he seemed to be pulling away from the people in the vicinity, at long last, and focusing on Erik.

Now, if he could do that before Erik's head exploded, that would be grand.

"Here we go," Iron Man said, depositing the cab on the balcony of the Stark Tower with the slightest crunch. A cracked window shattered, spraying cubes of glass over the marble and Charles' lightly frosted black coat. "Oops."

"That was awesome!" the driver said. "Can I get your autograph?"

"Sure. Do you have a pen?"

"Stark!" Erik barked the syllable like he was expelling the last of water from his lungs, following a lengthy dive.

"Right, of course. Can you wait?"

"I ain't going anywhere, dude, this is my cab."

"Excellent." Stark whirled in place and struck a pose, something Erik felt in the periphery of his mind – the armor was an unusual alloy and drew his attention – and knelt by the wrecked car. "Can you walk?"

"Do you think I would be sitting here, if I could walk?" Erik asked, an amazing feat when his tongue wanted to form words like gooberaniaikeemkeequissnick and ouuuueerranianesque. He felt Charles' influence in every syllable.

"Right. Gimme." Stark held out his hands towards Charles and nudged Erik's shoulder.

Erik stared at him, uncomprehending.

"Lehnsherr – help me out here. Cerebro is a short elevator ride away. We can reverse some cables, tune the world out, but I can't do that in here. I need to get Charles into Cerebro. Are you following?"

Erik felt his arms tighten around Charles' shoulders. Letting him go now was unthinkable. Not when his mind was still entangled in the telepath's, not when he could barely muster words without assistance. The last thought sparked a cloud of alarm and a torrential downpour of panic, something Erik discovered he was ill-prepared to handle. So he passed out. Simple, really.

*****

If the stray cables were removed, Erik thought drowsily upon waking up, this would be a perfectly pleasant room. He closed his eyes again and tried to drown in the harmonious hum of rare alloys.

"Erik."

Erik's head swiveled to the side, discovering Charles, laid out on a stretcher, similar to the one Erik was lying on. Their hands were joined in between, although the stretchers had been pushed close enough together that the contact was superfluous, as they were practically breathing one another's air, anyway. "I didn't get you anything," Erik whispered, choking on the rattle of words squeezing through his parched throat. "I'm your Secret Santa and I've got nothing for you."

In response he got a faint wave of disbelief.

"Sorry!" Charles said quickly. "I'm mostly out, but I didn't want to hurt you, so I had to move slowly. I might keep hearing you a little louder over the next few days."

Erik felt around for wounds, until a faint tickle in the back of his mind joggled a memory. "Are you alright?"

"Oh—yes. Thanks to you. I don't like car accidents."

"Aren't you a special breed," Erik said, rolling his eyes. As a testament to his legendary people skills, it was only after he remembered where he was and therefore remembered the photo on Stark's desk, that he was able to taste the foot in his mouth. "I'm so sorry, I wasn't thinking!" Charles had been standing in that photo, with his arm around Stark's shoulders, as they waved their diplomas, and the next photo, in which those same guys were pole-dancing in synch on a lamppost on a medieval city square.

"Don't worry about it," Charles said gently. "It was a car accident, yes. I'm so sorry about my behavior. I'm normally in control."

"It's fine."

"No, I mean it," Charles said, turning onto his side and bringing Erik's limp hand to his lips and twining their fingers together. "You saved my life."

"I didn't get you a gift," Erik said once again, feeling his face go red.

"We're going to have to disagree on that." Charles smiled and squeezed Erik's lax fingers. "But I'm going to let you make it up to me."

"Make it up how?"

"Say, dinner? Tomorrow night?" Charles was looking up at him hopefully.

Erik opened his mouth and then closed it. He was losing the ongoing battle for the manly pale-to-slightly-tanned color to remain on his face. "If you promise to wear the tuxedo," he said with difficulty, biting his lip immediately afterwards. He needn't have worried – Charles replied with another brilliant smile, curling his lips just so, and Erik, after running a cursory mental check on his body, turned onto his side. They were face to face now, their noses only an inch apart, both blushing furiously.

"I have another gift for you," Charles whispered shyly. "Pepper has it at the party. I thought thirteen would be an appropriate number."

"Excuse me," Jarvis' voice spoke over the invisible intercom, causing Erik to start and sit up. "Mr. Stark would like to enquire about your mental state, Dr. Xavier."

"I'm better, thank you." Charles lifted himself into a sitting position, but made no effort to slide his legs off the stretcher. "You can tell Tony he can come in."

"Thank fuck," Stark said, opening the door and striding in, still armored, with a couch under his arm. "You really need to rethink your life, Charles."

"Thank you. I'm fine. I will be fine. Please go to the party, I'll be fine."

"You sure?" Stark put the couch down, adjusted its angle in relation to the wall and looked at Charles. "I wouldn't want to get another panicked phone call from Jarvis. Jarvis – hey, do the panicky voice."

"Oh dear, Dr. Xavier seems to be in trouble," the AI intoned dryly.

"That was bad. That was just bad. Can you play the conversation? Because I gotta tell you, I'm amazed at my own genius there."

"The recording of the conversation has mysteriously vanished, sir. I hear solar flares are acting up again."

"I'm slightly less impressed now," Stark said, rolling his eyes and twirling a finger by his temple. "Solar flares. Starting tomorrow we are working on your 'coming up with believable lies' subroutines."

"I can hardly wait, sir," Jarvis said, approaching Lehnsherr-like levels of sardonic excitement.

"You should be. Lehnsherr, you want a ride? The party is waiting."

Erik looked at the admittedly impressive figure of the Iron Man, holding out a hand with a glowing light on it, offering him a ride to the party. All things considered it probably wasn't going to be the suit, but still. As far as impressive entrances go, this would have ranked great.

"You should go," Charles told him quietly. "I'll spend the night, if that's okay," he added to Stark. "Just in case. I'd be grateful if Jarvis would keep an optic circuit on my brain functions."

"The anomalies began to mellow out around the time Mr. Lehnsherr woke up, Dr. Xavier. I estimate it would take another three hours for your brain activity to regain its usual patterns."

Erik looked around, at the empty, white room and shook his head. "Thank you," he told Stark, "but I'm going to stay. In case Charles needs anything."

"I can't say I'm insulted. Or surprised. In fact, I might have just won fifty bucks." Stark grinned brightly. "Have fun! I'll have food delivered. Maybe a TV. Would you like a TV? I'd offer a second couch, but I think this one folds out."

"Tony," Charles said, "just go. Before I let certain people know how many drinks you've had before you put the armor on."

"Heavens, what is this tingly feeling, Jarvis, is it another solar flare?" Stark whirled in place and moonwalked out the door, flashing the hand-lights. "Solar flaaaare!"

"It might be your conscience, sir," Jarvis said, but Stark was already gone. "I'm sorry to say the couch doesn't fold out," he added. "I'm going to alert the people who arrive with the food."

"Thank you," Charles said warmly. "Could you help me to the couch, Erik?"

Right, the wheelchair was nowhere to be seen. Erik wheeled the stretcher closer to the white leather couch and was about to offer his assistance when Charles nimbly rolled off the stretcher's thin mattress and onto the couch, landing in a surprisingly coordinated half-reclining sprawl. "Are you really going to be fine?" he asked, returning the stretcher to its previous position while Charles sat up straight. He hadn't regained his normal level of paleness yet, but whatever color returned made an enormous difference.

"I'll be keeping a more restrictive schedule from now on, where Cerebro is concerned," Charles said, patting the couch beside him. "Thank you, Erik. I don't know what I would have done without you."

"I don't know, but I called Stark for help, which I now regret. How much did he drink?"

"He was flying straight, so I'm going to pretend I didn't hear anything."

Erik slowly slid onto the couch, feeling extremely self-conscious. Unless he was going crazy, promises of a dating nature had been made, and that meant there were obligations and social mores to adhere to. This would be fine, normally, except Erik would have trouble identifying any of those on a list of social mores, never mind coming up with them. Luckily, Charles didn't seem to expect much.

"You mind is very beautiful, you know," Charles said quietly, reaching for his hand and brushing a thought against his mind simultaneously. "And safe. I've never been completely inside someone. Thank you."

Erik nodded slowly and in a rash moment of decisiveness he tilted Charles' face and kissed him softly on the mouth. When he pulled back, just enough to make sure he wouldn't get punched, Charles was watching him with a glowing grin. "So, does this count as my Secret Santa gift?" he asked playfully, licking at his lips.

"I'm not great at budgets," Erik said, leaning for another kiss. "But I think you might be getting robbed if that's the case."

Erik never got to find out if the couch folded out, because about an hour later, an hour Erik spent stroking Charles' hair and trading lazy first-date kisses, the patented Stark Mobile Party Crew arrived.

First there came the bed. Not just any bed, but a full four-poster which four men assembled and dressed in under seven minutes. Then came the food, and Erik wasn't ashamed to admit that he'd been shocked when he discovered that when Tony Stark offered to send food over he didn't mean a spotty mutant boy with web-slinging powers and a pizza bag, but a pair of renowned Norwegian chefs whose relationship seemed to consist solely of daddy issues and more banter than a summer blockbuster. But even the fact that both the chefs demanded a thorough review of their respective talents, and wouldn't be persuaded to let it go, didn't matter, because by the end of the evening Erik found himself filled to the brim with a tenderloin steak, lefse and a bottle of red wine, but more importantly tucked into a warm bed, with Charles' head resting on his shoulder.

"This may well be the best Christmas ever," he said, thumbing at the droplet-shaped piece of adamantium, the final piece of Charles' thirteen gifts, which had arrived with the chefs and the bed. Miss Potts was amazingly organized, and, as Charles had now enlightened him, possessed significant sleight of hand skills.

"I agree," Charles said, finding a comfortable nook in Erik's collarbone to rest his cheek in. "Merry Christmas."

"Merry Christmas." Erik let his head fall to the pillow, sinking into a light doze, with Charles tucked close. Best Christmas of his life.

THE END


End file.
